ドンの生神女

In the autumn of 1380 a Russian army under Prince Dmitry met the forces of the Golden Horde on the field of Kulikovo, near the Don, and won. It was the first time the Moscow princes had beaten the Mongols in open battle, and it gave Dmitry his lasting name, Donskoy, of the Don. This icon of the Virgin and Child came to be tied to that victory. A later monastery record claims Cossacks from the Don gave it to Dmitry before the fight, though many scholars think it was painted a little afterward and the story grew up around it. It is a tender image, the type where mother and child press cheek to cheek, and the modelling of the faces has the free, almost painterly touch associated with Theophanes the Greek, the Byzantine master who worked in Russia in these years. On the back, unusually, is a second painting, the Dormition of the Virgin.